Please Note:
This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. If you are using a later version (Word 2007 or later), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for later versions of Word, click here: Sorting Comments by Date.

Sorting Comments by Date

Hamed has a document that has many different comments inserted throughout it. He would like to sort the comments by date so that he can get a view of how they were added to the document. He wonders if there is a way to do this.

There is no way to sort comments by date within a document. There are a couple of ways you can work around this, however, to get to what you want. The first way is to simply print the comments in the document. How you do this has been covered in other issues of WordTips. When you print the comments, they appear in the printout—automatically—in chronological order.

If you need more than a printout, however, you could also use a macro to extract all the comments and place them in a new document. The comments could be placed in the document in any order you desire, even chronologically. The following is an example of such a macro. It pulls the comments from your original document and places them in a table in a new document. The table is then sorted by date.

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(Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.)
This tip (11217) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Word (Word 2007 and later) here: Sorting Comments by Date.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. Learn more about Allen...

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